Asia

Thousands of coal miners in the far northeast of China have been on
strike for six days, demanding that China’s rulers – the so-called
Communist Party dictatorship (CCP) – “give us back our money!”

The protests, captured in dramatic video footage that is banned inside
China, have shaken the Chinese regime during the very week when its
ceremonial National People’s Congress (NPC) has been meeting in Beijing.
A key discussion at the NPC has been about how the regime will cut the
workforce in state-owned industries, with widely cited reports of 5-6
million redundancies, equivalent to one in six state sector jobs. The
striking mineworkers of Heilongjiang province, a region already
devastated by closures and layoffs, have given a courageous and
resounding answer to these plans.

The mineworkers’ protests began on Wednesday 9 March in the city of
Shuangyashan. Longmay Group, the largest state-owned coal producer in
northeastern China, operates 10 mines in Shuangyashan and over 40 across
the province as a whole. Last September, Longmay announced 100,000 job
cuts – 40 percent of its entire workforce. According to some reports
22,500 redundancies have already been implemented. The company also owes
a total of 800 million yuan (US$123 million) in unpaid wages dating from
2014. There have been earlier protests to demand payment of wage arrears
by Longmay workers around Heilongjiang, including in the city of Hegang
one year ago. The strike in Shuangyashan did not materialise from
nowhere in other words, but is akin to a match being dropped into a
large pool of gasoline.

“What the Shuangyashan incident has exposed is just a tip of the
iceberg. It has been pretty endemic (workers not getting paid),” a
rights activist from Heilongjiang told the Voice of America website.

In China, workers do not have their own trade unions. The only legal
union organisation is the government-controlled ACFTU, which invariably
sides with management against the workers. In the case of Longmay, the
ACFTU has been invisible and played no role in supporting the workers’
protests.

Governor’s speech angers workers

The trigger for the strike was a statement made by Heilongjiang’s
governor Lu Hao during the NPC. At a televised meeting on 6 March, Lu
claimed there were no wage arrears among Longmay workers and held the
company up as an example of successful restructuring. He also stated
that the annual payroll of Longmay is 10 billion yuan, equivalent to
one-third of the provincial government’s entire budget, implying that
the Longmay workforce is a burden on the province. “Their income hasn’t
fallen a penny,” said Lu, in comments that made the workers’ anger spill
over.

Initially breaking out in the Dongrong district of the city where
Longmay runs three mines, the protests quickly spread across the whole
of Shuangyashan. According to local sources eight out of the ten pits in
Shuangyashan are only partially working, with mineworkers facing months
of wage arrears. Whereas underground workers could earn 6,000 yuan a
month in the past, most receive just half this level now – when they get
paid. For surface workers, monthly salaries have been cut to just 800
yuan (US$120) in some cases.

The miners and their families marched to the headquarters of the
Shuangyashan mining authority with banners proclaiming “We must live, we
must eat!” and denouncing governor Lu as a liar. On Friday, up to 10,000
took part in demonstrations in the city. The main railway line out of
the city was blocked by protesters. “Thousands of people have been
protesting… the police have been taking people away,” an eyewitness told
Reuters.

“We’re demanding our own money, and some of us have been arrested,” a
worker told the New York Times. “Is it illegal to ask for our own
wages?” AFP reported an elderly women pleading with a government
official at the scene of the protests: “I’m on my knees, my family can’t
eat.”

A banner pictured on Weibo (China’s Twitter) proclaimed “Pay back the
money, Chinese Communist Party!”. This confirms the worst fears of the
one-party regime that workers’ anger can soon be directed against the
political regime and not just against local bosses for creating these
problems.

State repression

The workers’ decisive action forced governor Lu to issue a statement
admitting his previous information was false. The governor said the
provincial government would “support” Longmay in its restructuring
programme, contradicting previous statements that the government could
not keep “bailing out” the company, but without giving a clear
commitment to rectify the non-payment problems. Lu did not mention the
workers’ protests as the reason for his public retreat and China’s news
media have of course refused to report on the protests. They fear that
the Shuangyashan workers’ action could inspire other groups to take to
the streets. Despite the censors’ efforts to hide the news about
Shuangyashan, this has been among the top trending topics on social
media in China.

At the same time, as graphically shown in amateur videos, the provincial
authorities mobilised a huge contingent of armed police to forcibly
disperse the protests. The government of Shuangyashan warned in a
statement on its website that it would “strike firmly” against unrest
such as “blocking state railway lines, disrupting production activities,
organising joint actions and picking quarrels”. This clearly shows the
CCP regime’s fears that strikes and “joint actions” by workers could
spread.

As AFP’s report noted, “The situation in Heilongjiang exemplifies the
dilemma faced by Chinese authorities, who say they want to reform the
world’s second-largest economy and at the same time seek to avoid
unrest.” On a similar note, Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post
called the Shuangyashan strike, “a scene likely to be repeated as [the]
nation undergoes economic restructuring.”

The government is planning to close 500 million tonnes of coal capacity
and up to 150 million tonnes of steel capacity in the next 2-3 years, at
a cost of 1.8 million jobs in these two industries. The media is full of
reports of ‘zombie’ companies and the need to deal with China’s plague
of overcapacity. But the working class, whose wages are too low to
afford higher consumption, cannot be held responsible for this
overcapacity.

Xi Jinping says “face the market”

In the coal and steel boom years of 2006-2012, sections of the elite got
very rich through speculating in these sectors. But a glut was created
due to unplanned and speculative expansion, with coal prices falling by
more than 50 percent since 2012. Last year, 90 percent of coal mines in
China were reported as loss-making. This has pushed companies like
Longmay into debt. But it is the workers rather than the speculators who
are being made to pay.

With China’s economy also needing to upgrade to climate-friendly
renewable energy and shift away from fossil fuels such as coal, there is
an urgent need for more investment in green alternatives.

The Chinese dictatorship, which serves the interests of the billionaires
who have enriched themselves during the past three decades of increasing
capitalist restoration, wants us to believe that large scale closures
and killing off the ‘zombies’ is the only way out. Xi Jinping’s attitude
was spelt out at the NPC meeting on Monday 7 March, when he said Longmay
must “face the market”. This was reported on the company’s website.

The socialist approach is that workers’ should not pay for this crisis.
Only last November, 21 miners at one of Longmay’s mines in Jixi city
died in an underground fire. This is just one example of the incredible
sacrifices made by coal miners in China in order to power the ‘economic
miracle’ that the global capitalist economy now depends upon. China’s
coal industry has the worst safety record in the world.

Socialists argue that the transition to alternative energy must be
planned and managed democratically, not by bureaucratic diktat, but
through democratic control and management of major companies, banks and
natural resources by employees themselves and working class communities.
There should be guarantees that all jobs and salaries will be
safeguarded. This could be accomplished by creating a vast array of new
jobs in branches such as solar, wind and wave power, as well as the
development of green technologies and public transportation systems, and
a completely different approach to urban planning and construction based
on meeting environmental and social concerns.

Bailout for the stock market

In the past year, the Chinese regime’s ‘national team’ has bailed out
the stock market repeatedly. More than a trillion yuan of government
funds have been poured into supporting stocks to save the financial
speculators and banks from making bigger losses. But for those like the
miners of Heilongjiang there is “no money” according to the CCP
officials.

The strike in Shuangyashan is an important sign of what is happening in
China. It comes at a time when the number of workers’ protests is
soaring, with 90 percent of labour conflicts linked to wage arrears or
non-payment of social entitlements such as housing and pension funds.

Last year, according to Hong Kong-based NGO China Labour Bulletin, there
were 2,774 strikes in China, which is double the number in 2014. But
CLB’s strike data is based only on social media posts and the very few
strikes reported in official media – it believes the real number of
strikes in China could be eight times higher.

The northeast, including Heilongjiang, has been the scene of huge
workers’ struggles in the not-so-distant past. In 2002, tens of
thousands of workers in coal, oil and metal industries protested against
redundancies, even launching for a short period an independent trade
union. That movement was brutally crushed by the CCP, with workers’
leaders imprisoned. At that time the CCP regime under former premier Zhu
Rongji presided over mass downsizing and privatisation of state-owned
enterprises. Around 40 million state sector workers lost their jobs
between 1997-2002, in a reform that was praised by the global
capitalists and held up as a model for China’s current rulers to follow.

Today, Xi Jinping and his government are preparing a new wave of
downsizing and layoffs aimed at the ‘zombie’ companies. They say this
will be “gradual” and insist it won’t be on the same scale as the job
destruction under premier Zhu. At the NPC, the government unveiled a
‘resettlement fund’ of 100 billion yuan to compensate workers. But these
funds are insignificant compared to the scale of the job cuts being
announced and the devastating effects this will have on regional
economies such as Heilongjiang and the northeast.

This region is already a social powder keg. Unemployment and crime are
rising. Some cities are experiencing a shrinking population as the
younger generation move away to find jobs. The Shuangyashan strike was
undoubtedly a wake-up call for China’s leaders gathered at the NPC
meeting. There are voices warning that the working class, not least in
the hard-hit northeast, will rise up to fight these draconian cutbacks.
Because the gap between rich and poor is much wider than in the late
1990s, and the global economy no longer offers new markets and sources
of growth, the mood of resistance can be even more determined than it
was at that time. The idea of an independent trade union movement in
China, which was briefly realised in the mass protests of 2002, will be
resurrected as an unstoppable force in the period we are now entering.